From Wickquasgeck to Broadway

I have a fantasy of returning to ancient London and finding the way to my Camden home, just using the Thames and various hills and hollows for navigation. What fun it would be to track down the hunting grounds of Wardour Street ringing to the cry of ‘Soho!’, the exclamation used by hare coursers that lent its name to the area. How moving to dip your feet in the river Fleet, now running under Fleet Street, or swim in the Westbourne along West- bourne Grove.

You get the same sort of kick out of Russell Shorto’s heavy-going but authoritative account of the Dutch discovery of Manhattan (from the Indian word, mannahata — ‘hilly island’). Well, not entirely Dutch. The first white man to see New York, or New Amsterdam as it was to begin with, was the Englishman, Henry Hudson, working for a Dutch company. When he got to Manhattan, in 1609, he found an island covered in oak, chestnut, poplar, pine and blue plums, with great knuckles of protruding rock like those in today’s Central Park, the whole place rich in game and surrounded by water teeming with salmon, mullet and rays.

That my-how-things-have-changed thrill continues as you read about New York’s development under Dutch rule. Peter Stuyvesant, the greatest powerbroker of the mid-17th century, cleared forest and set up the largest farm on the island, in the East Village. The site of his farmhouse is now taken up by an Arab news-stand, a Yemenite-Israeli restaurant, a pizza shop, a Japanese restaurant and a Jewish deli.

Within a few decades of their arrival, the Dutch immigrants were building settlements whose names, a little anglicised, survive today, like the little village of Breuckelen (now Brooklyn), Jonas Bronck’s Plantation (the Bronx), Nieuw Haarlem (Harlem) and, out across the East River, Vlissingen (now Flushing Meadow, home to the US Open tennis championships).